Then Black Piet, whose sullen temper could not brook to be crossed, broke into a blaze of rage.

“Do you dare to disobey me?” he shouted with an awful Kaffir oath.  “Let her go, dog, or I will kill you.”

At this the man, who knew his master, loosed hold of Suzanne, who ran away, though it was not until she reached the water that she noticed a white ring round her arm, where his grip had rubbed the paint off the skin beneath.  Strangely enough Van Vooren saw the ring, and at that distance mistook it for an ivory ornament such as Kaffir women often wear above the elbow.  Still more strangely its white colour made him think again of the white woman who sat aloft yonder, and he turned his face upwards, forgetting all about the black girl with the child.

Thrusting herself through the crowd, Suzanne ran on for a while till she was clear of the worst of it, then terrified though she was, she could resist the temptation of the water no longer, for her mouth and throat felt dry and rough.  Climbing down to the edge of the river she drank greedily under the shelter of a rock, and when she had satisfied some of her thirst, she poured water into the mouth of the child, dipping its shrunken little body into the stream, whereon it seemed to increase before her eyes like a dry sponge that is left out in the rain.

While she tended the child thus, and just as it began to find its senses and to wail feebly, she chanced to look up, and to her terror saw that man from whom she had escaped walking along the bank looking for her.  Happy was it for Suzanne that the rock under which she was crouched hid her, for the man stood for thirty seconds or more within two paces, so that she was obliged to plunge the body of the boy under water to stifle its crying.

Then, as it happened, the Kaffir caught sight of another woman and infant, more than a hundred yards away, and ran off towards them.  Thereon Suzanne, replacing the half-choked child upon her back, climbed the bank, hiding the white mark upon her arm beneath the blanket, and taking such shelter as she could behind stones or cattle, or knots of people who, their thirst appeased, were hastening to escape, she slipped across the shoulder of the slope.

Now she was out of sight of Swart Piet and his men, and for the first time for many a day began to breathe freely.  For a while she crept on round the flank of the mountain, then at the best of her speed she struck across the plain straight for the saw-edged rock ten miles away, which marked the entrance to the pass over the Quathlamba range.

From time to time Suzanne looked behind her, but none followed her, nor, search as she would, could she discover any trace of Zinti, who, she began to fear, must have come to some harm.  One thing she could see, however—­the whitened corpse set on high in the chair of rock, and by the side of it a black dot that she knew to be Sihamba.  Twice she turned round and gazed at it, but the second time the dot had become almost imperceptible, although it still was there.  Long and earnestly she looked, sending her farewell through space to that true friend and deliverer whose eyes, as she knew well, watched her flight and whose heart went with her.